I live in a converted carriage house apartment that was clearly not designed with a book collection in mind, and I currently own more books than I have shelf space for, in a genuinely quantifiable, measurable way, there are stacks on the floor next to the actual shelves. the rational fix here is obvious to literally everyone who’s seen my apartment. get an ereader. free up the floor. stop this.

I’m not going to. I want to be honest that this isn’t really a defensible position and I’ve stopped trying to defend it as one.

part of it is the reading log. I’ve kept a physical one, a plain notebook, since before I moved here, and it’s not just a list of titles, it’s marginalia, half formed thoughts I jotted mid-book that I never would’ve bothered typing into an app. going back through old entries is like finding a slightly younger, slightly wronger version of myself arguing with a book in real time. an app would technically let me do the same thing. I’ve tried the apps. I never actually write in them the way I write in the notebook, and I think that’s because a notebook doesn’t feel like it’s tracking me, it just feels like it’s mine.

there’s also the museum thing, which I recognize is doing a lot of the explaining here. I spend my working hours handling actual physical objects that have survived decades specifically because someone cared for the physical thing itself, not a description of it. a photograph isn’t the same as a digital scan of a photograph, even a perfect one, there’s something about the object having actually been present for the moment it captured that a file can’t replicate. I know a paperback isn’t a museum artifact. but some of that same instinct, that the object matters and not just the content, has clearly leaked into how I think about my own books.

and honestly, some of it is just vanity. I like seeing them. I like that a friend can walk into my apartment and get a rough read on who I am from the spines on the shelf, in a way nobody’s ever going to get from glancing at my ereader’s home screen. the disorganized stacks on the floor are embarrassing in the specific way that only things you actually care about are embarrassing.

so the books keep coming, and the floor situation keeps getting worse, and every few months I do a real cull, give a box away, feel briefly virtuous, and then buy four more books within the month. I’ve made peace with this being who I am rather than a problem I’m actively solving. the ereader would fix the floor. I don’t actually want the floor fixed that badly.